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The Cubo armchair was designed by Jorje Zalzupin in 1978 and produced by L'Atelier. Both the seat and the back give the impression of being carved from a solid cube. Its structure is made plywood, coated of foam and based on a black ebonized plywood base.
These two pieces are upholstered in white bouclé fabric. Their original covering was in brown faux leather.
The Cubo chair was produced in different modules, from a simple armchair to a 2 and 3 seats. Subsequently, Etel and the Zalzupin family made available a new sofa model with 4 seats, as well as a version with a wood finish.
Dimensions: L86cm x W86cmx H63cm
Jorge Zalszupin
Jorge Zalszupin (1922- 2020) was a Polish-born architect and designer who became a naturalized Brazilian citizen. He is considered one of the greatest names in Brazilian design and architecture.
The Second World War forced Zalzupin's family to go into exile in Romania in 1940. Zalzupin graduated from the Bucharest School of Fine Arts and then from the Faculty of Architecture. In 1945, he left for Paris and in 1949, after a brief stay in Rio de Janeiro, he settled in São Paulo to begin a decade of work as a designer.
In the early 1950s, he opened an architecture office in partnership with José Gugliota. After a while, tired of designing pieces exclusively for the homes of elite clients, he decided to join a group of cabinetmakers and produce small series, which led to the creation of the L'Atelier factory in 1959, which soon went on to manufacture office furniture and went from being an artisanal cabinetmaker to a mass-production industry.
At L'Atelier he managed to create an aesthetic that matched his expectations, oriented towards comfort, the search for utopia and an easy way of life, translated into a design with curvilinear shapes and where the appeal to nature was emphasized through the use of noble woods typical of Brazil, in particular Jacarandá from Bahia.
The first piece designed was the "Danish" armchair, a tribute to Finn Juhl's Scandinavian design. Composed of rosewood and an upholstered seat, it has toothpick legs, and the front arms and feet are reminiscent of the columns designed by Niemeyer for the Alvorada Palace.
The 1960s were a decade in which L'Atelier enjoyed great success and strong growth, driven by orders for furniture to make up the spaces created by Oscar Niemeyer, particularly the administrative and residential buildings of the country's new capital, Brasília.
At the time, L'Atelier had up to 200 employees and reached a size that allowed it to invest in industrial tools linked to the thermoformed wood veneer technique, thanks to which Zalszupin produced many of his iconic creations such as the Onda bench, the Presidencial armchairs and sofas, the Pétalas table, etc.
The designer also used the technique of veneering small strips of wood, mainly with Jacarandá da Bahia, to take advantage of the chromatic variations offered by this beautiful wood to create a dynamic textural effect with a single material. Zalszupin will use this invention on shelves, various pieces of furniture and especially on his famous and sought-after Guanabara table, where the top made of jacaranda scraps rests on a solid cement base covered in leather.
Zalszupin creates pieces that can be executed in various versions, some intended for office furniture and others more oriented towards domestic use. For example, he created the Commander armchair, which can be used as an office chair, in the version with wheels, or on a steel base for a living room.
In the early 1970s, with serious financial problems, L'Atelier was sold to a business group. The sale was negotiated and Zalszupin retained his position as director of research and product development. Zalszupin expanded the team of designers (which already included Oswaldo Mellone) to include Paulo Jorge Pedreira and Lílian Weimberg. The designers named the business group and began to act as a creative laboratory.
The team of designers maximized the technical possibilities offered by four different industrial plants. Hevea, which produced plastic commodities, started producing a very sophisticated line of design products, resulting in the creation of the Hevea brand, which specializes in household utensils sold in supermarkets. L'Atelier began to incorporate plastic into its product line, producing panels for offices and licensing the Hille chair in polypropylene, designed by Robin Day. In addition to the products, the Forsa group's design team tested new ideas, which form an extraordinary collection and certainly influenced the work of Oswaldo Mellone and Paulo Jorge Pedreira.
The crisis of the 1980s profoundly affected the Forsa group's performance. The design team left the company at the end of the decade. Oswaldo Mellone and Paulo Jorge Pedreira opened their offices, and Jorge Zalszupin devoted himself exclusively to architecture.